The present invention relates generally to cooking apparatus and, in various preferred embodiments thereof, more particularly provides commercial hot air impingement cooking apparatus which, compared to conventional commercial cooking devices such as pizza hearth ovens, frying griddles, convection ovens and broiling grills, provides a variety of advantages.
Conventional commercial cooking devices of the types representatively listed above are subject to a variety of well known disadvantages and limitations including relatively high fabrication and operating costs, lengthy pre-cooking warmup time, undesirable variation in batch-to-batch cooking times, uneven heat transfer to the food items being cooked, and/or the inability to vary the relative cooking rates of upper and lower portions of the food items.
A prime example of a commercial cooking device which is subject to a variety of these disadvantages and limitations is the stone hearth oven used to cook pizzas. The stone hearths used in these ovens to support and cook the pizzas is typically approximately 11/2" thick and takes approximately two hours to be preheated from room temperature to its approximately 500.degree. F. operating temperature. Because of this elongated warmup time, it is conventional practice, while the pizza establishment is closed during the night, to very uneconomically maintain the oven at a holding temperature of approximately 300.degree. F. so that the warmup time at the beginning of the next business day is reduced to an acceptably short time.
Because of the very substantial thermal lag unavoidably associated with these thick stone hearths, there is a substantial variation in batch cooking times. For example, the first batch of pizzas cooked in a given business day, after the stone hearth has been preheated to its 500.degree. F. operating temperature, takes approximately 10 minutes. However, the next batch typically takes approximately 12 minutes, and the succeeding batches take approximately 15 minutes each.
Additionally, there is typically no provision for varying the relative cooking rates of the pizza crust and its topping ingredients.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide improved commercial cooking apparatus which eliminates or minimizes above-mentioned and other disadvantages and limitations typically associated with commercial cooking devices such as pizza ovens, frying griddles, convection ovens and broiling grills.